There are ever increasing numbers of devices within the home, office buildings or the outdoor environment that have processing and communication capabilities which allow such devices to interact with other processing devices and cloud services. Everyday objects and relatively small scale processing devices may be connected to each other and to central platforms as part of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). For example, a heating system in the home may gather information from various temperature sensors and control the activation of heaters based on the gathered information; a factory pollution monitoring sensor may gather information from various chemical sensors and arrange maintenance based on the gathered information; whilst a healthcare provider may use wireless sensors, such as a heart rate monitor to track the health of patients while they are at home. In the cases described above the data is generally forwarded to a cloud service on the internet, using machine-to-machine (M2M) communication techniques.
In IoT, or in a typical M2M communication network, devices (or nodes) communicate with other devices within the network using a routing scheme. Routing schemes such as broadcasting and multicasting may enable one-to-many or many-to-many distribution which enables data to be sent to multiple devices simultaneously. However, devices in these networks may tend to have low processing power and small memory or small data storage capacity. The devices may lack user interfaces because, for example, of the cost of having a user interface such as a display, or because a display consumes too much power, or because of the physical size of the device itself making it difficult to provide a user interface. The devices may need to be configured in order to connect to the IoT or to other devices/services, but may lack, or have reduced capabilities for, configuration directly on the device. The device may not, for example, have the capability to feedback specific problems in the routing scheme used in the network.